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© 2003 Carl Hanser
© 2003 Carl Hanser
Rather disconcerted by my encounter with these two discreet
tall
Family documents inscribed in handsomely curving letters lay quiet in their glass cases, with Carlo Bonaparte’s two shotguns, a couple of pistols, and a fencing foil.
Jérôme,
his
But what can we know in advance of the course of history, which unfolds according to some logically indecipherable law, impelled forward, often changing direction at the crucial moment, by tiny, imponderable events, by a barely perceptible current of air, a leaf falling to the ground, a glance exchanged across a great crowd of people. Even in retrospect we cannot see what things were really like before that moment, and how this or that world-shaking event came about.
The most precise study of the past scarcely comes any closer to the unimaginable truth than, for instance, a far-fetched claim
the cataclysmic events caused by the Emperor of the French in the lands and realms of Europe were to be traced solely to his color blindness, which made him unable to tell red from green. The more blood flowed on the battlefield, this Belgian scholar told me, the greener Napoleon thought
soaring from the bright side of the rocks into the
shadows and darting out of the shadows into the light again,
I swam out to sea with a great sense of lightness, very far out, so far that I felt I could simply let myself drift away
I passed through the iron gate, which squealed on its hinges, this proved to be a rather desolate graveyard of the kind not uncommon in France, where you have the impression not so much of an antechamber to eternal life as of a place administered by the local authority and designed for the secular removal of waste matter from human society.
German cemetery florists, usually consisting of heathers, dwarf conifers, and pansies of absolutely standard shape, planted in spotless, soot-black soil in strict geometrical rows,
graves in the Mediterranean countries: a blond hussar in
on her
birthday, her face almost extinguished by the sun and the r...
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population accepted them. In an account dating from 1893,
